“A portrait of imperfect people who had the passion and pragmatism to put an end to a brutal and broken system.” – Financial Times

In 1961, when Franco Basaglia arrived outside the grim walls of the Gorizia asylum, on the Italian border with Yugoslavia, it was a place of horror, a Bedlam for the mentally sick and excluded, redolent of Basaglia’s own wartime experience inside a fascist gaol. Patients were frequently restrained for long periods, and therapy was largely a matter of electric and insulin shocks. The corridors stank, and for many of the interned the doors were locked for life. This was a concentration camp, not a hospital.

Basaglia, the new Director, was expected to practise all the skills of oppression in which he had been schooled, but he would have none of this. The place had to be closed down by opening it up from the inside, bringing freedom and democracy to the patients, the nurses and the psychiatrists working in that ‘total institution’.

Inspired by the writings of authors such as Primo Levi, R. D. Laing, Erving Goffman, Michel Foucault and Frantz Fanon, and the practices of experimental therapeutic communities in the UK, Basaglia’s seminal work as a psychiatrist and campaigner in Gorizia, Parma and Trieste fed into and substantially contributed to the national and international movement of 1968. In 1978 a law was passed (the ‘Basaglia law’) which sanctioned the closure of the entire Italian asylum system.

The first comprehensive study of this revolutionary approach to mental health care, The Man Who Closed the Asylums is a gripping account of one of the most influential movements in twentiethcentury psychiatry, which helped to transform the way we see mental illness. Basaglia’s work saved countless people from a miserable existence, and his legacy persists, as an object lesson in the struggle against the brutality and ignorance that the establishment peddles to the public as common sense.

Reviews

“The anti-asylum movement in 1960s
and ’70s Italy forms one of the
most fascinating episodes in western
psychiatry. John Foot’s richly
documented and revealing study of
this movement and its pioneer figure,
the charismatic radical psychiatrist
Franco Basaglia, adds immeasurably
to our understanding of the troubled
history of mental health care in
modern times.”

– Barbara Taylor, author of The Last Asylum

“In Italy, the literature on Basaglia tends towards either idealisation or demonisation – he’s considered either a secular saint or a dangerous radical. John Foot gives a much more rounded, and fair, portrait of a complicated, committed man.”

“A scholar steeped in the twists and turns of Italian history of the 20th century … Foot has made wonderful use of [the materials of the Basaglia archive] … exploring them through the lens of the politics and fractured nature of the country itself.”

“It is fashionable in some quarters to laugh at the radical left of the 1960s. The Man Who Closed the Asylums feels refreshing in that regard — as a portrait of imperfect people who had the passion and pragmatism to put an end to a brutal and broken system.”

“Brings this diversity, richness and complexity to life in an exemplary fashion, illuminating all its different manifestations and contradictions... A triumph of committed scholarship”

– Paul Gordon, Times Literary Supplement

“John Foot stresses throughout his exemplary account [that] myth and reality aren't easily separated in Basaglia's story... Foot restores a critical distance that makes it possible to present Basaglia's achievements as part of a wider story. In Italy, it took more than one man to close the asylums.”

“A brilliant historical
reconstruction of the work
and ideas of one of the
world’s leading exponents
of critical psychiatry.”

– David Forgacs, author of Italy’s Margins

“Peopled by a cast of extraordinary
characters – patients, colleagues,
friends and enemies – revolving around
the charismatic and now legendary
psychiatrist Franco Basaglia, John Foot’s
sympathetic account de-mythologises
the reform by uncovering little-known
precedents, distancing Basaglia from
anti-psychiatry and situating his work
within Italian radical politics of the
late 1960s. Indispensable reading for
anyone interested in psychiatric reform.”

“An important work by John Foot … should put to rest the badly-informed, lazy narrative that still prevails to the effect that Franco Basaglia was an idealist – an ‘anti-psychiatrist’ – who, at a stroke, disempowered doctors to certify someone as insane with disastrous results.”